Milo Yiannopolous is a provocateur. A British national stirring up American politics, a gay icon of the alt-right, he takes hateful positions on race and politics that have earned him wrath and protests wherever he appears. He advocated for sex with 13-year-olds. He cheered on Gamergate’s harassment of women. As a result, now, his life…
The Boston Globe published an AP story about David Pecker, CEO of the parent company of The National Enquirer, who kept the secrets of Donald Trump and other media figures in a safe as leverage. This kind of story is catnip to the mostly liberal Globe readers, but there’s a problem — the Globe’s content…
According to the Washington Post, Facebook is rating your trustworthiness on a zero-to-one scale. Not only that, they won’t tell you how they rate people. Here’s why that’s a necessary first step in squashing the spread of fake news. First, let’s get this out of the way. Facebook is biased. All social media and search…
The Boston Globe challenged other newspapers to write editorials in support of press freedom today. More than 350 responded. I’m a huge news fanboy. In my job as an analyst, I got to work with reporters like Jefferson Graham of USA Today, Jon Healey of the San Jose Mercury and the Los Angeles Times, Tony…
Satire is the art of exaggerating reality to make a point about its absurdity. So, this just happened: Omarosa Manigault Newman, the former game show contestant hired at the White House and fired less than a year later, claims that the reason President Trump is senile is that he drinks eight Diet Cokes a day. President…
Social media helped us shake up rigid institutions and empower people, but gave us a new world that has proven to be brittle and destructive. The new power structures that have arisen aren’t up to the job of maintaining our civilization. When Charlene Li and I wrote Groundswell ten years ago, we had a utopian vision…
It’s clear that Russians interfered in our elections. But their objective was not primarily to elect Donald Trump — it was to make us hate each other. And they’re succeeding. New information on Russian troll activity is now available, including a corpus of 3 million tweets from Russian trolls who were part of a foreign…
Facebook has joined Apple, Youtube, and Disqus in banning Alex Jones and yanking his InfoWars pages. Jones and his supporters are livid, claiming free speech violations, while liberals are wondering what took so long. The challenge here is that lying on Facebook is perfectly fine; only “hate speech” will get you banned. Let’s take a…
Should free-speech gun advocate Cody Wilson be able to provide you with shape files and instructions to create a 3D-printed plastic gun? That’s a question that forces freedom-loving people to think hard about which freedoms they support. Wilson and his company Defense Distributed sued the government, which was blocking his plan to put the gun…